revival of it should come first in Italy. Southern Italy (_Magna Graecia_)
had remained under the Eastern Empire and Greek until its conquest by the
Normans (1041-71), and to southern Italy a few Greek monks had from time
to time migrated. With southern Italy, though, papal Italy and the western
Christian world seem to have had little contact. In 1339, and again in
1342, a Greek monk from southern Italy visited the Pope, coming as an
ambassador from Constantinople, and from him Petrarch learned the Greek
alphabet. In 1353 another envoy brought Petrarch a copy of Homer. This he
could not read, but in time (1367) a poor translation into Latin was
effected. Boccaccio studied Greek, being the first western scholar to read
Homer in the original.

Near the end of the fourteenth century it became known in Florence that
Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher
of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished
Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the
Eastern Emperor. Florentine scholars visited him, and on his return
accompanied him to Constantinople to learn Greek. In 1396 Chrysoloras was
invited by Florence to accept an appointment, in the university there, to
the first chair of Greek letters in the West, and accepted. From 1396 to
1400 he taught Greek in the rich and stately city of Florence, at that
time the intellectual and artistic center of Christendom. For a few years,
beginning in 1402, he also taught Greek at the University of Pavia. He had
earlier written a _Catechism of Greek Grammar_, and at Pavia he began a
literal rendering of Plato's _Republic_ into Latin. From his visit dates
the enthusiasm for the study of Greek in the West.

OTHER GREEK SCHOLARS ARRIVE IN ITALY. Chrysoloras returned to
Constantinople for a time, in 1403, and Guarino of Verona, who had been
one of his pupils, accompanied him and spent five years there as a member